Website redesign cost and quote: items, price ranges and an example

A website redesign is rarely priced at a glance: two quotes for the same site can differ by a factor of three, because they do not cover the same items. To estimate the cost of a redesign and read a quote, you first need to know what it is made of.

This article covers the full redesign of a site: new design, often a new CMS, content carried over. The cost of the migration and redirects part alone is covered in our article on the price of a website migration service.

A complete redesign quote breaks down into seven items, heavier or lighter depending on the project:

• scoping: workshops, audit of the current site, target structure, specifications;
• design: mock-ups of the main templates, mobile versions, brand guidelines if they change;
• development: building the mock-ups, setting up the CMS, specific features, connections to other tools (CRM, ERP, payment);
• content and data migration: rewriting or adapting texts, data migration (pages, articles, products, customers), media;
• SEO and redirects: initial SEO audit, redirect plan for every old URL, checks before and after go-live;
• acceptance testing: functional tests, across browsers and mobiles, fixes;
• hosting and maintenance: go-live, hosting, licences and extensions, maintenance and updates, often billed every year.

With the same items, the price depends mainly on:

• the size of the site: number of different templates to design, number of pages and products to migrate, number of languages;
• custom work: an adapted theme costs less than a design created from scratch, a standard feature less than a specific development;
• a change of CMS: it adds migrating the data into another format and almost always changes the URLs;
• integrations: each tool to connect (ERP, CRM, logistics, marketplace) has to be specified, developed and tested;
• the provider: a freelancer, a local agency or a large agency have neither the same day rate nor the same level of coordination;
• the share done in-house: writing, content entry or testing done by your teams reduce the quote, not the work.

There is no official price list: the ranges below are ballpark figures commonly seen in France for a redesign carried out by a provider, to be taken as reference points, not as prices.

• brochure site of a few dozen pages, on an adapted theme: from a few thousand to around fifteen thousand euros;
• rich corporate or editorial site (many templates, several languages, large blog): roughly 15,000 to 50,000 euros;
• e-commerce site: from about 20,000 euros, and well beyond 100,000 euros with a large catalogue, integrations or a custom platform.

The gap within each range comes from the factors listed above. The only way to get a reliable figure is a precise specification, submitted to several providers.

As an example, here is the breakdown in days of the redesign of a brochure site of about forty pages, with a change of CMS and a design based on a theme:

• scoping, audit and structure: 2 days;
• design of the templates (home, service page, article, contact) and mobile versions: 5 days;
• build, CMS set-up and forms: 8 days;
• migration and formatting of content, media: 4 days;
• SEO: initial audit, redirect plan, tags, checks: 2 days;
• acceptance testing and fixes: 2 days;
• go-live and support: 1 day.

That is 24 days, multiplied by the provider's day rate, plus licences, hosting and annual maintenance. A serious quote shows this breakdown; a global amount without detail lets you neither compare nor negotiate.

To compare two quotes, bring them back to the same items and check:

• that each covers content migration and the redirect plan, two items often forgotten or left to the client;
• the number of templates, rounds of revisions on the mock-ups and languages included;
• what is delivered at the end: access to the CMS, ownership of the code and mock-ups, documentation;
• what remains payable afterwards: maintenance, hosting, licences, changes;
• the schedule, with a testing period before go-live.

The most expensive item is often the one that is not in the quote: a redesign put online without a redirect plan loses the rankings of the old pages, their inbound links and the traffic that goes with them. Recovering takes months, and the lost revenue quickly exceeds the price of the SEO item that was meant to be saved. SEO problems after a redesign most often come from missing or approximate redirects.

So include in the budget the inventory of existing URLs, their mapping to the new pages and the checking of redirects before and after go-live. The cost of this part is detailed in our article on the price of a website migration, and Swan's prices are on the Pricing page.